His Conquering Sword (13 page)

“The horses,” said Yevgeni.

Hyacinth hobbled their horses, caught the strays and as many of the others as he could, and hobbled them as well. Yevgeni’s horse—well, it was suffering, that much was apparent.

“Kill it,” said Yevgeni.

What choice did he have? Force Yevgeni to leave his sister? The rider had two of the arrows out, by now, but the third came slowly, spiraling out along its tracks on the silk undershirt she wore, driven into the wound. Hyacinth hadn’t a clue how to kill a horse. He used his knife to stun it into oblivion and hoped it would bleed to death before it woke up. Then he went back to Yevgeni and ran the scan over him. He set the med kit out and queried the modeler about first aid, and the slate began a stream of directions to him in clear Anglais.

Yevgeni started so badly that he almost twitched the arrow still lodged in Valye’s side. He swore, and then again, seeing that Hyacinth wasn’t speaking. He went white. “What is that?” He was terrified. “Who is that speaking?”

“Trust me,” said Hyacinth. “Just trust me. Take that arrow out.” Listening to the directions, Hyacinth did as well as he could with the equipment in the med kit. He used a sonic cleaner to sterilize the various wounds and an antibiotic spray to prevent infection. The seamer stitched up Yevgeni’s head wound, sealing it, and his leg wound as well, and Valye’s thigh wound, but there was nothing he could do about the internal damage. He ran the emergency pulse again, or so he hoped; he could not hear anything. Yevgeni was in shock by this time. He stumbled away from Hyacinth and began to gather wood for a fire, refusing to be deflected from this task, so Hyacinth set up his tent by himself. They carried Valye into it and laid her on the floor. She did not regain consciousness. Her breath bubbled and subsided. Night fell. No one came.

All that long night Yevgeni sat beside her. Hyacinth set up the lantern, not caring now if its constant, tireless glow amazed Yevgeni, but Yevgeni sat so sunk in grief that he did not seem to care. Valye breathed. Night passed. No one came.

She died at dawn, slipping peacefully out of herself and away. Yevgeni readied the fire, evidently not caring that it would provide a beacon for any other khaja bandits passing by. He dressed her carefully and folded her hands over her chest; he laid her on the fire, and lit it. It blazed up. Soon smoke and flames concealed her from their view. Yevgeni flung himself on the ground and keened. He threw off his shirt and slashed himself with his knife, over and over, along his arms and on his chest. Blood, like tears, washed him.

Hyacinth stared at his transmitter. No one had come. They had abandoned him.

Morning passed. The pyre burned. The sun rose to its zenith, reminding Hyacinth bitterly that exactly one day had passed since they had halted here before. The bodies of the dead khaja still lay on the ground, ravaged by night stalkers. Insects swarmed them. A bird circled down and settled with lazy grace on the corpse farthest from the horses. It began to feed. Soon another bird joined it.

Hyacinth walked forward and touched Yevgeni on the neck. “Yevgeni,” he said softly, not trusting the other man not to jump up and threaten him with that knife. At least Yevgeni had stopped mutilating himself, though blood still seeped from the cuts scored all over his skin. “Shouldn’t we move on? What if they come back? If someone else comes?”

“Ah, gods,” said Yevgeni, his voice hoarse with rage and sorrow, “she trusted me. When did I bring her anything but grief?”

Hyacinth winced. Yevgeni’s desolation was a palpable thing, like a blow. Yevgeni stared at the fire that consumed his sister’s body. If he even noticed Hyacinth’s hand on his neck, he gave no sign of it. “Yevgeni, we should ride on. What if there are others around here?”

“What does it matter? Grandmother Night will have her revenge on us in the end.” His voice sounded hollow and lifeless. “We killed her holy messengers, and the only punishment for that crime is death. It has already begun. Valye is dead. What does it matter if we die, too?”

Yevgeni had given up. Hyacinth shut his eyes. “Yevgeni, listen to me. I don’t believe in grandmother night. I’m not going to die, not for grandmother night, not for you, and not for them!” He opened his eyes, shocked at his own vehemence. But it was true; now that they had lost everything, now that he had been abandoned by his own people, now he refused to give up.

Yevgeni lifted his head. His eyes were glazed, but a sudden gleam of fear lit them. “You mustn’t speak of her with such disrespect,” he said, but with no force behind the comment.

“And risk what? Valye is already dead. What else is there but our own lives? I’m going on, and you’re coming with me.” Hyacinth did not know what else to do, except to keep moving. Yevgeni rose, stiff with pain and drying cuts, but he would not let Hyacinth clean his wounds. Face drawn, he pulled his shirt on over the raw cuts. He hesitated. The pyre burned steadily now, but Hyacinth was not sure how much of Valye’s body would actually be consumed by the time it went out. He didn’t intend to wait around to see what khaja locals the fire attracted.

“Yevgeni, come on.”

Yevgeni obeyed numbly. They strung the khaja horses on with the rest and set off northeast, up the valley.

That night, Hyacinth downed two birds with his knife and brought them back to camp. Yevgeni sat slumped over his knees, apathetic now in his grief. Hyacinth sighed and stared at the two birds. He steeled himself, going off a few paces away from the safety of the hobbled horses, and he began the disgusting, messy work of preparing them for supper. He hadn’t a clue what to do with them. He plucked at the feathers, but they wouldn’t come out cleanly. He had to hack and tear at the skin and peel it off entirely. It was horrible. He cut off their heads and feet, swore copiously, gutted them, and threw up once at the smell and sticky texture of the fluids that gushed out of them. But he did it.

Yevgeni just sat there. Hyacinth got out the little solar powered oven he had stolen from the Company’s camp and roasted the two birds in it. That wasn’t so bad, since the oven had all kinds of timing devices built into it according to weight and type of meat. He also heated water to boiling and while the meat cooked, he took a cloth and dabbed the cuts on Yevgeni’s back with hot water. Yevgeni let him do it. He was otherwise listless. He shivered, and Hyacinth hoped that he wasn’t going to get some kind of infection. He brought out the scanner again and ran it over Yevgeni, and the med program on his slate advised him to use the antiseptic mist.

“What are you doing?” Yevgeni asked at last, roused out of his stupor by the stinging of the mist.

“Keeping you well. Roasting some meat.”

But Yevgeni wouldn’t eat when Hyacinth brought him the roasted fowl.

Hyacinth crouched beside him and took Yevgeni’s chin in his hand. “They’ve all abandoned you, Yevgeni, don’t you see that? So what does it matter what you do?”

“It matters to the gods.”

“Well, I don’t believe in your gods. How did those twelve men fall off their horses?”

For the first time since Valye’s death, Yevgeni lifted his gaze to look directly at Hyacinth. “I don’t know,” he whispered.

“I did that, and you know I’m no fighter.”

“You’re a Singer. A shaman. Perhaps you know sorcery.”

“It’s not sorcery either. Listen, Yevgeni. Maybe we have a way out of this. Do you know where the shrine of Morava is? Maybe Soerensen is still there.”

The glaze of dullness that stiffened Yevgeni’s expression lightened slightly. “Who is Soerensen?”

“The Prince of Jeds. If we can find him—”

“He would help us?” Yevgeni shook his head. “He can’t help us. No woman or man can, now that Grandmother Night has settled her terrible gaze on us.”

“Yes, he can. He’s more powerful than grandmother night.”

“Don’t say that!” Yevgeni shrank away from him.

“But it’s true. I made those men fall down, with this knife. I can heal your wounds with these simple instruments. That box is an oven that baked this meat without fire. I’m more powerful than grandmother night. Let me show you something.”

He brought out his slate and unfolded it, so that it lay flat on the ground. In silence, Yevgeni watched. “Do you remember the jaran tale we sang? The one about Mekhala, the woman who brought horses to the jaran?”

Yevgeni lowered his eyes. “Yes.” He said it as if something shamed him about the memory. “I was with Valye. She liked to see your people’s singing.”

“Run Mekhala folktale, scene two. Meter field.”

In scene two, Hyacinth played the khaja prince who had come to demand tribute from the rhan, as the jaran tribes had called themselves before they had gotten horses and become ja-rhan, the people of the wind. Above the slate, about a meter cubed, the play unfolded: Anahita as Mekhala and Diana as her sister, Hyacinth entering as the prince with his retinue of Quinn and Oriana.

Yevgeni stared openmouthed at the image, moving, playing out. He reached out and snatched his hand back before he touched it. “Sorcery,” he murmured.

“No, it’s not sorcery. It’s a—oh, hell, there’s no way to explain it to you. Run image of Morava.”

The image melted away and re-formed into the gorgeous dome and towers of the Chapalii palace the jaran called Morava. Hyacinth had not seen Morava except through this program, and he was delighted to be able to pace around it and see the complex from all angles. He envied the duke’s party for experiencing it firsthand.

“But how did it get so small?” Yevgeni demanded. “How did you capture it and bring it here?”

“It’s just an image, Yevgeni, not the shrine itself. Look, do you know what a map is? Let me see. Maybe I can reconstruct where we left the army, and where we are now. It’s been thirty-five days since we left camp and if we’ve ridden northeast… Goddess. I should have paid more attention in cartography tutorial.”

“But no one is more powerful than Grandmother Night,” said Yevgeni suddenly. “Even seeing these things and what you did to those khaja bandits, still… She attends us at our birth and grants us a measure of days in which to live. She is the One with whom we may bargain for gifts, if we’re willing to risk the bargaining, if we’re desperate enough. She is death, Hyacinth. No person can escape death.”

“How old do you think the Prince of Jeds is?”

Yevgeni shrugged. “Of an age with Bakhtiian, I suppose.”

“He isn’t. He’s older than Mother Sakhalin.”

“He can’t be.”

“He is. Why would I lie to you? Dr. Hierakis is older than he is. Owen is in his seventies, too, and Ginny is at least as old as that. Yet they are still young. My great-grandmother Nguyen is one hundred and sixteen years old, and I can expect to live at least as long as she has and stay young until I’m ninety or so. Grandmother night doesn’t scare us. You’ve got to believe me, Yevgeni. You’ve got to
want
to believe me, you’ve got to want to live. If we can make it to the shrine, if we can find the duke—”

Yevgeni reached up abruptly and touched Hyacinth’s cheek. “That’s when I fell in love with you,” he said in a low voice. “When I saw that song, the song you did about Mekhala. Valye said you were really the khaja prince and that it was a wind demon truly drawn down to walk among us, but I knew you were just a person singing two different songs. You were so beautiful.”

Hyacinth shut his eyes. How Owen would have loved this scene: Yevgeni’s voice blended grief and wonder and a shy yearning so perfectly, and the way he held his body reflected his longing and his sorrow and his actual physical pain. But this was real. Hyacinth knelt and put his arms around the other man. Yevgeni gasped, from the pain of the embrace, but he did not draw away.

“Oh, damn,” murmured Hyacinth, “it must hurt.”

“No, no,” said Yevgeni into his hair, “never mind it. I gave it for her, who followed me to her death.”

“We won’t die. That way you can remember her. That way part of her will always live, with you.”

Yevgeni sighed against him but said nothing. There was nothing he needed to say, not at that moment. Hyacinth stroked his hair and held him carefully, tenderly.

After a little while, Hyacinth warmed up the meat in the oven and Yevgeni ate a sliver of it, though it was the flesh of the gods’ sacred messengers. Not much, but by that small gesture, Hyacinth knew that Yevgeni had cast his lot with his khaja lover and abandoned his own people once and for all.

I
N THE MIDDLE OF
the night, Tess woke to the sound of footsteps in the outer chamber. She heaved herself up and slipped on a silk robe, tying it closed just under her breasts and above her pregnant belly. She pushed the curtain aside and walked into her husband.

He had been pacing. She could tell by the way his shoulders were drawn forward and one hand clenched up by his beard. He opened the hand and splayed it over one side of her belly. “The child is growing,” he said. “And all of a sudden, it seems. I think you’re twice the size you were at Hamrat, and it’s only been sixteen days since we left there.”

“Oh, gods, and it’s all pressing on my bladder.”

“Do you want me to walk with you?”

“No.” She slipped on a pair of sandals, threw a cloak over her silk robe, and walked out to the freshly-dug pits sited at the edge of the Orzhekov encampment. At night, it was quiet and peaceful here, but she knew that about a kilometer away lay the royal city of Karkand, settled in for a long siege. She greeted guards, and they greeted her in return. They were used to her nightly peregrinations. The guards looked a little chilled, but she was never cold now, even in the middle of the night.

When she got back to the tent, Ilya was pacing again. “Here,” she said, “stop that. It’s moving again. Sit down.” She settled down cross-legged beside him and opened her robe. He rested both of his hands on her belly. “What’s bothering you?”

He did not reply. He concentrated on her, on her belly, on his hands.

“There, did you feel that?” she asked. He shook his head. “It’s mostly like a fluttering, now, like butterflies. When I get bigger, you’ll feel it.”

He sighed and withdrew his hands, and stood, and walked to the entrance of the tent and then back to her. “How does Ursula know so much?” he demanded. “Although she is always respectful, she speaks with the authority of Sakhalin himself. We rode a circuit of the city today and she pointed out where siege engines might be used to the greatest effect, and how the river might be dammed so that it could flood the walls and the citadel. She speaks as if she has seen and done all these things before, as if she has already ridden with an army like ours.”